veritas et caritas

Friday, December 18, 2015

From Where Such Sound?

In the Bleak Midwinter, Stille Nacht, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Adeste Fideles, Handel's Messiah, Veni, Veni Emanuel, Gaudete! Gaudete! Christus est natus... Is such music an accident, a composer's misguided belief in the Creator's invasion of history? Can such sound exist in the world apart from a Grand Composer? Is such music merely the product of deluded men who plunked the harpsichord without any transcendent tablature whispered in their ears?

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

A New Kind of Religious Zeal

I find it quite revealing that so many today hold a kind of religious zeal concerning certain scientific speculations such as global warming and evolution. There is the fierce dogmatism and loyalty to a creed that makes me almost believe that the modern secularist would even willingly be martyred for such scientific conjectures. I guess when one has abandoned the religious creed one must substitute the creed of the culture and hold it as if it too promised something like heaven.

GOP Debate

Ben Carson came across as a man that inspired old fashioned goodness (a commodity so lacking in our world today) . He was the soft spoken one that mentioned God and came down hard on political correctness as being perhaps the principle cause of our demise as a nation. Rand Paul showed his excellent constitutional mind in his nailing the fact that uncontrolled debt will devastate us if we don't stop policing the world. Trump showed his willingness to call out one of the baiting questioners. He is one who isn't afraid to shame so many of us PC complicit to tell us all that the emperor has no clothes. Such a revelation dare not escape our own muzzled mouths. Perhaps the popularity in the polls is partly due to people feeling hope at someone who has the courage we so lack to spit out the muzzle.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Answering an Evolutionist

But Sir, don't you see how amazing it would be to even create a living cell from nothing? Even if everything came from one living cell, what made it living? Even if everything came from one atom, where did the atom come from? Did someone make it? And if there is an Omipotence would it be any more difficult to create each individual species as it would be to make something out of nothing? Making something out of nothing seems to be the more difficult task. But for a true Omnipotence there is nothng that is difficult.

Trump Cards and Trump Words

In cards often there are called what are 'trump cards' which trump all other cards. And so in language the current politically correct terms seem to trump all other concerns in the game. I heard of a bishop today who used such a PC word as a trump. 'Discrimination' was the word he used with regards to the 'refugees' and he used it as if such a word trumped all other factors. But I had to ask myself if this word should be used thus. After all, don't we all discriminate? I am discriminating right now by writing on FB and not an email, or writing in my journal, or reading Dickens. I am discriminating in deciding to marry or not marry a particular girl, I am discriminating on friendships those souls as Polonius advised one should 'grapple to thy soul with hoops of steel'....And wasn't it at one time used as a positive expression....'Oh, doesn't she have discirminating tastes!' So just as a reminder for myself and those that feel inclined to seek to understand how language manipulates us evaluate how a word is used and whether the word itself colors our perception. Of course there are times when we discriminate in harmful and unjust ways. But then aren't there sometimes when we discriminate in wise just ways? Perhaps the Trojans would have been wise in a little use of discrimination when the Trojan Horse was offered them.

Monday, December 14, 2015

The One Cause of Joy

Today's sermon from Fr. Raymond was insistent that there was only one cause of joy. Fear not. It is I. I have overcome the world. You are not insignificant. He knows you intimately like a bridegroom knows his bride. And beware the distractions of daily life that so negate our joy. Many even in the pews, in the Church, here before me today live with a lack of faith. Many feel rejected. Many are caught in the web of relationships, caught in the web of anxieties that would choke the stream of faith. John the Baptist proclaimed the Agnes Dei. It is this Lamb of God who is really present in our world, present in the tabernacles, present in our souls. Jesus, yes, is present even in the most insignificant act of love for He is Love itself. He is present in every struggle for justice, present in all beauty, present in the purity of a soul in prayer, present in ordinary silence....Increase my faith, help me embrace You in all your tender triumphs, Your Love that transforms us. May it be so.

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

The Latest Word in Webster's

Funny, I've been really noticing how the term "radicalized" has become the new addition to Webster's and is the fashionable way of talking about terrorists and their proclivity to commit carnage. Well, being a guy that has always been interested in words, especially the ones that seem somehow to magically appear by Pravda Linguistics I wonder could it be a way to take the heat off of an ideology and make it appear that even Norwegian grandmothers, Polish farmers, Swedish Lutheran landowners, your next door Baptist neighbors can just as easily be "radicalized" and thus there is no reason at all to be a radicalizedaphobe?

Monday, December 7, 2015

Howling Handel

Handel's Messiah at Tremont Temple Baptist Church. I was wondering who was singing one of the first chorus pieces way off key---it was really a howl, almost the way a hound dog might interpret Handel. I did not wish to embarrass the person by looking over so I kept my eyes straight ahead until the conductor about half way through had us greet one another with a Merry Christmas. It was then that I got my first glimpse of the howler. Of course my curiosity was raised. Perhaps some ancient elder who had no hearing and was baying as best he could. No, it was not. I could now see the young man only about four feet tall with the down syndrome features, greeting everyone around him with untainted affection. He immediately loved everyone in his hand-grasping vicinity. And then much later at the finale came the Hallelujah chorus. Well...first the audience rose en mass and above even the strong voices of the choir and a few of the audience joining in was to my left that voice in reckless abandon howling out Hallelujahs and I could barely sing myself my throat was so heavy from the beauty of this little man. I don't think I will be surprised at all if this little man will be singing solo in the music chambers of the Kingdom. It will be him with his hands raised and howling out Handel's Hallelujah like it's never been howled before. I hope Handel is there to hear it.

Saturday, December 5, 2015

Nonsense

This might be the first time in history that nonsense has truly become an artform. The first time that a country doesn't seek a unifying culture but seeks to erode it by a competing one, that it seeks to repair itself by its very corruptors, that it dismisses Deity at ever opportunity when it is our society's original Foundation and its only adequate Physician, when it claims to care for the child when it stops the child from even becoming a child, when it says it is pro-wome...n when it advocates for clinicians to transgress the most sacred part of her, when it pushes for what a Book says which it does not believe, when it acts like the utopia is having a Lexus and the latest thing off the rack at Macy's; when it says we are non-conformists when it finds fashion of mind and body irresistable. Yes, nonsense has truly attained an artform---yet I wonder as most of modern art: does anyone really understand it?

Safer

I must say that I don't think I've ever felt safer. I mean I'm in a gun-free zone, a no place for hate community, an equals-sign culture, a celebration of diversity neighborhood, a carbon footprint sensitive environment...yes, I feel quite impervious to anything that might be un-pacifist, intolerant, hateful, un-diverse, carbon rich...It's quite satisfying

Friday, December 4, 2015

Partaking of the Politically Correct Poison

Could it be a self loathing that makes one wish to partake of the politically correct poison that one just saw the lethal effect of on others? Not only once but over and over and over again? And why I wonder do we fear the PC police as others once feared the KGB or the Gestapo? If we continue to let the Left keep any offending truth from being uttered I'm afraid that we are doomed to all the fatalities that falsehood will give.

"God Isn't Stopping This"

After reading the latest trustworthy TImes and Dailys I have to now conclude that it is Christian prayer that should be banned. I am grateful that I who was once so in the dark about the real instigators of all these terrorisms have received the proper catechetical instruction on the real cause. I haven't even questioned that those that don't see God as the 'First Cause' see his lack of involvement as the 'Actual Cause' of such things that we are now witnessing so often that it's only a matter of time when such news will elicit yawns in all the newsrooms. Anyhow I am just wondering if anyone knows where I can get a "God Isn't Stopping This" bumper sticker? and where might I find a place to post a few Government prayers? Of course we can be certain that they will be heard. Can I hear an Amen?

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Hans Christian Andersen's Story Comes True Again

Quite amazing how muzzled we have become that when the emperor keeps showing up without his new suit of clothes that we continue to mouth the same praise for the same non-existent wardrobe. It is truly baffling. I wish there were more brave boys that would dare to speak the truth that the emperor isn't wearing anything at all.

Workplace Violence Yet Again?

Now isn't it interesting how this latest mass slaying has been framed. Was it work place violence? Was the perpetrator (could his name be Olaf Svensen or perhaps Antonio Savatore, or perhaps John Paul Jones, or Mr. Jefferson Smith?) angered by a few comrades at work? Or might he have just had a bad hair day and decided to take it out on the good people of this sunny California town? He was touted in the news that he was a 'praying man' and no doubt the media will see that he ...could've just as easily been a Christian fundamentalist...say a Baptist that went ballistic or a Lutheran that went lunatic.... And too they will equate that his problem was that he was radicalized just like so many Lutherans, Calvinists, Baptists, RCs can be radicalized. And no doubt they will still demonize those of us who would rather these 'praying men' stay on the other side of the world.

About Me

I am a writer currently working on novels and poetry. Previously I have worked in the Selway Bitteroot Wilderness as a fire fighter and on trails, worked as an editor for a book company, and taught Latin and Literature at a Christian School. Two years ago I went to Poland to teach English at a church camp in Czarna Gora (winter) and in Wladyslawowo (summer). It is quite a beatiful country (piekny Kraj).